This time, though, I’m forewarned.
My short trip into low earth orbit required a twenty-million-dollar rocket. Mars is literally another world, vastly farther away. I know the transit will involve complex orbital dynamics and gravity boosts, but it will also require a rocket a hell of a lot bigger and costlier than the one that ferried me into orbit.
A rocket like that should be easy to track down.
My thoughts snap back to the present when my skullnet icon flicks on: fiery red veins against a black background. A flood of manufactured anxiety hits me, overwhelming my homegrown fears and bringing with it a premonition that death is on its way. I’m not the only one who receives the warning. Chatter erupts over gen-com as everyone speaks at once.
“What the fuck?”’
“Something’s up?”
“What is it? Anybody know?”
“Kanoa, you got anything for me?” I look out the windshield, but all I see is the rugged ice below us, its low peaks and pinnacles smoothed by the recent fall of snow.
Kanoa checks in, grim-voiced, speaking to the entire squad. “Warning, warning. Radar indicates a fighter coming in low and dark. Tracks back to a Chinese carrier off Greenland. Trajectory indicates an intercept. Shelley—”
“Full throttle!” I yell at Escamilla. “Get us into Canadian territory.”
I tell myself there is no way a Chinese fighter will shoot us down over territory claimed by Canada, but Kanoa puts an end to my fantasy when he says in a deadly calm voice, “Ninety seconds to missile range.”
Dr. Parris suspected Vince Glover had a Chinese
connection. It’s starting to look like she was right—and when the Chinese decide to clean up a dirty situation, they don’t fuck around.
“Down!” I yell at Escamilla. “Put us on the ice.”
“Roger that.”
Our airspeed slows; the deck drops away beneath me. I twist around to look in back.
Night vision details Logan, Tran, and Roman huddled on the cargo floor, their opaque visors turned in my direction. “Rig up!” I tell them. “
Move, move!
Claim your compass points, and when we hit the ice, scatter!”
Scattering is the trained response of an LCS under air attack. The more distance we put between each soldier, the harder a pilot has to work to gun us down.
Roman is first up. “North!” she says as she snaps open the folded frame of her dead sister.
Tran is right behind her. “West.”
There’s not enough room to extend the rigs all the way, not enough room to stand up straight. They strap in anyway. It’s a chaos of titanium bones and Arctic camo as they bend and crouch and help each other secure their cinches.
Logan eases his pack on, careful not to knock anyone down. Over gen-com, he says, “Escamilla! You—”
I cut him off. “I’ll take care of Escamilla.”
“Right, sir. I’m south, then—and you’d better get rigged.”
“Clear some room.”
They press against the walls. I get out of my harness and climb over the seats. Tran has my rig unfolded, the leg struts bent in a crouch. I cinch up. The deck sways, but Tran and Roman both grab me, keep me from falling. Logan helps me get my pack on. I grab my HITR from the floor and loop it over my shoulder. “Escamilla, you are east. Got that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“As soon as you get this ship down, roll out the door and fucking run for your life. I will get your gear to you.”
“Roger that, Shelley.”
Logan is crouched by the eastern window. Night vision shows me a slice of sky behind him, marred by a dark mote moving fast between the stars.
“Escamilla, why aren’t we on the ground?”
“We need a place to land, sir. There’s smooth ice ahead. Maybe twenty seconds.”
Too much time.
“Get us as low as you can. Logan, Tran, open the doors.”
A sliding door on each side gets slammed back, admitting a blast of arctic air along with the roar of the oncoming jet, audible even over the helicopter’s own engine noise.
“Ten seconds,” Escamilla says.
I wait with Logan. Roman and Tran are on the other side. The ice, shot through with broken pinnacles, speeds past, five meters below us.
“You are within missile range,” Kanoa warns.
“Rocket!”
Logan yells.
“
Jump!
And not into the fucking rotors!”
A half second of blurred motion, and they are gone. It’s only me and Escamilla. I reach over the seat and pop his harness. “Get the fuck out.” Then I turn, grab his gear, pitch it out the left doorway—the doorway facing east, the one that shows me the fiery trail of a rocket slaloming toward me—and I follow the gear, rolling out the door, praying I don’t collide with Escamilla.
I slam shoulder-first into the ice. My momentum flips me into the air. I come down on my arm struts in an explosion of snow just as the rocket finds the helicopter. Flame enfolds the world and the pressure wave hits, knocking me back in time, all the way back to Dassari: my legs blown off,
unable to move, and the fighter screaming overhead, the muddy ground trembling beneath me.
The Chinese fighter blows past and the vibration wanes. The present locks back in. It’s not mud I’m clinging to; it’s ice. I shove the terror away and make myself scan the squad icons.
Not all green, but none flashing critical red either.
“Escamilla! Status?”
“Moving, sir!” He sounds like he’s speaking through gritted teeth. “I think I broke a fucking rib.”
I slap the ice with my arm hooks, launching myself to my feet. In the west, night vision shows me the fighter coming around for another pass. “Enemy incoming! If you’ve got cover, take it!”
I race north, looking for Escamilla’s gear. I find it only twenty meters away. The squad map puts him southeast of my position. I scoop up his pack and the folded bones of his dead sister and take off in that direction, the leg struts of my exoskeleton powering me over the rough terrain.
The fighter is roaring in low, hunting us, hunting me. I’m the one in motion. I don’t want to lead him to Escamilla, so I look for a ridge or a pinnacle of ice high enough to hide me, but I don’t see anything like that. What I see is oily smoke curling over a pool of open water. No sign of the helicopter.
I hear a burst from the fighter’s autocannon. The pilot has found a target. My squad map assures me no one else is in motion, so I’m pretty sure his target is me. I drop Escamilla’s gear. I think maybe Kanoa is yelling at me, but I’m not listening. How can I listen? Despite the protection of my helmet, the jet’s roar is all I hear. It’s Dassari all over again—and maybe because I came so close to dying like this before, I opt for a different way out.
No less terrifying.
I drop my HITR and shrug off my pack, throwing it behind me, hoping it will provide a target to distract the pilot. Then I dive, sliding across the ice toward the open water. I’ll drown this time rather than being blown apart again.
Given a choice, though? I’d rather live.
Just before I drop over the edge of the ice, I pivot on my belly and hammer my arm hooks into the edge of the floe. My legs hit the water first. The weight of my dead sister pulls me down, plunging me under the surface. I am fully extended, hanging by my arm hooks, knowing that if those hooks slip or if the ice breaks, I’m heading for the ocean floor.
The full impact of the cold is tempered by my thermal layer, which keeps the water away from my torso and my limbs, but as my helmet floods, the water touches my lips, my nose, my eyes. I squeeze my eyes shut, imagining my shocked brain shrinking to a tiny, hot point.
It’s not imagination when I feel the ice snap away under my right hook. The hook slips, but it catches again. And then there’s a muffled
boom
! The ice shudders. The hook slips a second time.
I want to breathe.
Worse than that, the water is finding its way inside my thermal suit, seeping past the neckline and the wrist cuffs, climbing my thighs—it feels like razor blades slicing away my skin—and I change my mind about the kind of death I prefer.
I haul against the arm hooks, expecting them to slip. If they slip, my only chance is to un-cinch before I go too deep. Down on the bottom it’ll be so cold, my body might never rot. Buried in silt, I could become a fossil for some freaking ape to dig up in twenty million years. Or I’ll be food for crabs and starfish.
The arm hooks hold.
My helmeted head breaks the surface, the water drains away, and I breathe. Releasing my right hook, I reach across the surface of the floe, jam the point in, and haul myself high enough to get an elbow over the edge. The hooks hold me, so I don’t slide back. I reset them one at a time, dragging myself up onto the floe.
I lie there, watching the water drain out of my sleeve, amazed at the way it transforms into thin sheets of white ice before it quite escapes. I notice my body shaking uncontrollably. It’s a clinical observation. I tell myself I’ll be all right. My thermals are designed to hold in heat whether they’re wet or dry.
I make myself focus on the present. First thing: Scan my squad icons. They are green and yellow, but I’m shivering too hard to read the details. I push myself up to a sitting position. The wind is blowing, but I feel it only as a pressure. Maybe I’m too cold to feel colder. Maybe my gear is doing its job.
The night has gone quiet. So quiet, a stray thought questions if I’ve gone deaf—or maybe the audio gear in my helmet has shorted out? I decide to test it, though my chattering teeth make it hard to talk. “R-roll c-call,” I say over gen-com.
It’s a relief to hear them respond:
“Logan.”
“Roman.”
“Escamilla.”
“Tran.”
“W-where’s the f-fighter?” I ask no one in particular.
Then I see it myself. It’s in the northeast, a ghostly arrowhead in night vision, halfway through a wide turn that will bring it around for another pass.
It never finishes that turn.
The sky is clear, but distant thunder rumbles in the south—and the Chinese fighter reacts, pulling straight up, rocketing toward the stars like it’s intending to leave the planet. In seconds, it’s too small to see, and then the southern thunder resolves into the roar of at least two more fighters streaking in pursuit.
I presume it’s a show of force, the Canadian Air Force scrambled to defend their offshore claims. I get up, as the two jets pass far to the east.
“Logan, y-you got an injury r-report?”
“Yes, sir. Escamilla thinks he’s got a broken rib. Me and Tran are just banged up and bruised.”
“Do we have mobility?”
Escamilla growls, “I can walk.”
“Kanoa, y-you there?”
“Here.”
“We need a n-new extraction plan.”
“In process. Stand by.”
I make myself stand up. I need to move. Generate some heat. Give my thermal layer something to work with. So I go looking for my pack.
I dropped it as a decoy and I guess the strategy worked, because I find a second crater where the pack should be. A film of newly frozen ice is already forming on the surface of the open water.
I look around, but my squad is hunkered down and I can’t see them. I don’t see Escamilla’s gear either. I’ve got a feeling the crater swallowed it too, and it’s on its way to the bottom.
“Escamilla, I think I lost your gear.”
“Goddamn it, Shelley. I can’t fucking trust you for anything.”
“Something to keep in mind.”
I look back the way we came, touched by a new worry.
After its second pass, the Chinese fighter swung much farther north than it needed to. Why? Did we turn Tuvalu Station into a target just by being there?
I ask Kanoa. He assures me Tuvalu Station is intact, but maybe that’s only because the cavalry arrived. Thinking about Jaynie as additional collateral damage on this fucked-up mission sends the chill even deeper into my bones. I want to get out of here before we make things even worse.
We’re still eight kilometers out from
Sigil
. We start walking. Progress is slow because Escamilla doesn’t have his rig, and we’re all exhausted—but a few minutes later, Kanoa checks in.
“Good news. That Chinese fighter forced the Red to revisit this mission, and we finally got an order through. Oscar-
1
is on his way.”
It’s a relief to hear it. Then again, it’ll be almost two hours before Oscar-
1
reaches us. We keep walking, and even with Escamilla slowing us down, we get to
Sigil
first.
• • • •
The tiltrotor is too big to land on
Sigil
’s helipad so, fighting the wind, Jason Okamoto holds it in a hover while we load our wounded and our gear. He’s in a hurry to leave, and not just because of the weather. “There’s a Canadian gunship an hour behind me,” he tells us over gen-com as we load Julian’s stretcher and secure it to the floor. “And a no-fly order in effect. So far, I’ve got official clearance, but this is not a good time to be flying on counterfeit orders—especially after that refueling fiasco.”
“Get the door closed,” I tell Tran.
As soon as it latches, we’re on our way, riding the buffeting wind south. Our two prisoners get left behind. Let the Canadians figure out what to do with them.
It takes a few minutes to tie down our folded exoskeletons, secure our packs, and stow our helmets. We’re still linked into gen-com through our overlays. Fadul grabs the empty copilot’s seat. The rest of us buckle in to the fold-up canvas seats mounted on the cabin’s side rails.
“All secure back there?” Okamoto asks.
“Roger that.”
He turns off the cabin lights, and then the deck tilts as he puts Oscar-
1
into a steep climb to try to get us above the worst of the wind. It’s going to be a hell of a long flight home.
I lean back, close my eyes, cross my arms over my chest, and dial the sensory feedback from my legs down to nothing. It’s warm in the cabin. That plus the darkness and the roar of the engines quickly lulls me into a half sleep—until Tran speaks over gen-com. “You know what I don’t get?”
I snap awake, my heart racing. He’s a shadowy figure, sitting across the narrow cabin between Roman and Logan.
“What do you not get?” Escamilla asks in a surly voice as he stretches his long legs across the cabin’s narrow floor.